Boy, I wish all program bugs were so easy to find. Thanks to the fine
problem description by Bob, N4BP, I found the cause of this problem
in less than 30 seconds! Within a minute I had a new version of NA
compiled and ready to go. Life is good...
In retrospect, every single one of N4BP's suspicions were right on.
The problem occured in a little subroutine called TickDelay, which
generates timed delays and is used in the program in a multitude of
places. Way back a when we did the the Yaesu radio routine, I
determined that a short delay was needed before starting to process
the radio data, so TickDelay was called to generate a short (100 mS)
delay.
This worked fine until NA 10.17 which added the self-registration
process. When the signon screen pops up for three seconds or so
(another application of TickDelay) I wanted to be able to abort the delay
by pressing a key. So....I modified TickDelay to terminate if a key was
pressed. However in most of the uses of TickDelay, this capability was
neither needed or desired so I included a way to omit checking for the
key.
In looking at the one single line of code this involves, it dawned on me
that because of the way it was written, it would still check for the key
even if it would not act upon it. The end result is that while TickDelay
was delaying, it was emptying the keyboard buffer. Exactly our problem.
NA 10.21 should be available sometime in the next 24 hours on the web
site, the LTA BBS, and through Radio Bookstore. It has this and three
other bugs fixed, plus a couple new or revised features. A press release
will follow here on the reflector.
Thanks to everyone who provided observations on this problem. A great
example of users working together to make the program work better.
A great big hand and a "Hero of NA" award to Bob Patten, N4BP for taking
the time to put together succinct observations that led to this solution.
73,
Dave Pruett, K8CC DATOM Engineering
2727 Harris Rd, Ypsilanti, MI 48198 DATOM@contesting.com
k8cc@ix.netcom.com http://www.contesting.com/datom
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